Almost 1 in 3 US warplanes is a robot

Remember when the US military actually put human beings in the
cockpits of its planes? They still do, but in far fewer numbers.
According to a new congressional report acquired by Wired, drones
now account for 31 percent of all military aircraft.

To be fair, lots of those drones are tiny flying spies, like the US Army's Raven, that
could never accommodate even the most diminutive pilot.
(Specifically, the US Army has 5,346 Ravens, making it the most
numerous military drone by far.) But in 2005, only five percent of
military aircraft were robots, a report by the Congressional
Research Service notes. Barely seven years later, the military has
7,494 drones. Total number of old school, manned aircraft: 10,767
planes.

A small sliver of those nearly 7,500 drones gets all of the
attention. The military owns 161 Predators -- the iconic flying
strike drone used over Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere -- and Reapers, the Predator's bigger, better-armed brother.

But even as the US military's bought a ton of drones in the past
few years, the Pentagon spends much, much more money on planes with
people in them. Manned aircraft still get 92 percent of the
Pentagon's aircraft procurement money. Still, since 2001, the
military has spent $26 billion (£16.85 billion) on drones, the
report finds.

The drones are also getting safer. (To operate, that is; not
for their targets below.) Drone crashes get a lot of attention; 38
Predators and Reapers have crashed in Iraq and Afghanistan thus
far; most recently, Iran looks like it got ahold of an
advanced, stealthy RQ-170
Sentinel. But the congressional report finds that the Predator,
for instance, has only 7.5 accidents per 100,000 hours of flight,
down from 20 accidents over that time in 2005 -- meaning it's now
got an accident rate comparable to a (manned) F-16.

But the report doesn't mention some of the unique
vulnerabilities of the drones. There's no mention of
the malware infection that reached into the drone
cockpits at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, a story that Wiredbroke. Nor does it go into the workload problems for military
imagery analysts caused by the proliferation of the drones
full-motion video "Death TV," which is pushing the military
toward developing selective or "thinking" cameras. The ethical issues
attendant to remote-control war also go unexplored.

Still, the report does explore the downsides of the Pentagon's
drone obsession. There are way too many redundant drones, it finds,
and the expensive sensors they increasingly carry drive the costs
of a supposedly cheap machine up. They're also bandwidth hogs: a
single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of
bandwidth, the report finds, which is "500 percent of the total
bandwidth of the entire US military used during the 1991 Gulf War."
And it also notes that a lot of future spy missions might go not to
drones, but to the increasing
number of giant blimps and aerostats, some of which can
carry way more sensors and cameras.

And the current fleet of flying robots is just the start. The
Navy's developing a next-gen drone that can take
off and land from an aircraft carrier. Future missions, the
report finds, include "stand-off jamming" of enemy electronics;
"psychological operations, such as dropping leaflets" over an
adversary population; and even measuring the amount of radiation in
the earth's atmosphere. The military's working on increasingly
autonomous drones -- including tiny, suicidal killers -- and on increasing the number of
drones a single ground station can operate.

The Air Force even holds out hope for a "super/hyper-sonic"
drone by 2034. It's a good time to be a flying robot.

Congressional Research Service reports typically aren't public,
but you can read
it in full for yourself on Wired.com, where it has been
embedded. It compiles and updates a lot of useful information about
military drones.